History and Description of the Jay Papers Project

The Papers of John Jay is an image database and indexing tool
comprising some 13,000 documents (more than 30,000
page images) scanned chiefly from photocopies of the
originals. Most of the source material was
assembled by Columbia University's John Jay publication
project staff during the 1960s and 1970s under the
direction of the late Professor Richard B. Morris. These
photocopies were originally intended to be used as
source texts for documents to be included in a planned
four-volume letterpress series entitled The Selected Unpublished Papers of John Jay.

Unfortunately only two
volumes of the series appeared before Morris’s
death in 1989, John Jay: The Making of a Revolutionary,
Unpublished Papers 1745-1780 (New York: Harper & Row,
1975)
and John Jay: TheWinning of the
Peace, Unpublished Papers, 1780-1784(New York: Harper & Row, 1980).

When the project closed in 1996, the
photocopied documents were transferred to the
Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Shortly thereafter
Elaine Sloan, then University Librarian, established
an Advisory Board, consisting of Barbara Black,
George Welwood Murray Professor of Legal History
at Columbia; Patricia Bonomi, Professor of History
Emerita at New York University; Barbara
Oberg, then editor of the Benjamin Franklin Papers
at Yale University; and Herbert Sloan, Professor
of History at Barnard College, and convened by
Gouverneur Morris Professor of History Richard
L. Bushman, to make recommendations about the future
of the project.

Letterpress
Edition and Database. The
Advisory Board recommended that Columbia continue
to pursue plans for the letterpress edition under
a new editor. Funding
was secured in
2004 from the National Historical Publication
and Records Commission for a revised and updated
selective letterpress edition that would include
seven volumes and be completed by 2012. The
Advisory Board also recommended, however, that
the Libraries address the more immediate need
for scholars to have access to the still-unpublished
material collected for the original project by seeking
funding to digitize and mount those documents
on the Web.

The
National Endowment for the Humanities agreed with
this aim and provided a two-year grant for the
project for the years 2000-2002. Additional funding
was provided in 2001 by the Florence Gould Foundation.The Papers
of John Jay database was launched initially
in December 2002.

Expansion
& Enhancement Initiative. From
March 2003 to March 2006 Columbia University
Libraries continued to expand the content and
enhance the functionality of the database, drawing
upon staff and funding provided by the new Columbia
Libraries Digital Program initiative, which had
been established in 2002. At the
time of its initial launch in December 2002
the database included Jay documents from about
fifty institutions; by 2006 this number had risen
to ninety. During
this period over 1,500 new documents ( ca.
12,000 page images)
were also added, including 1,300 color scans from
original documents in Columbia’s
Rare Book & Manuscript
Library.

Future
Prospects. The
Papers of John Jay Papers is designed to
be a working tool for students, scholars and
the interested public. It remains
a work in progress. New documents can
be added, corrections to existing information
made, and identifications completed by using
the comments form or by writing to the Rare
Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia. We
look forward to collaborating with our users
in making this an effective and useful resource.

Rights
and Permissions. Intellectual property rights to the materials
on this database remain with the owning repositories.
People wishing to publish or otherwise use images
found on this database must contact these institutions
for information
and permission. Please
consult as well the Copyright &
Use statement referenced on the John
Jay Papers home page.

Image Quality. Please
note: the quality of some of the images is not
ideal. Because we were attempting to make
available as soon as possible material that had
been collected forty years ago, salvaging some
of the hard work that had been done by various
generations of project editors and assistants,
we approached the project differently than we
would have had we been starting from scratch
with new scans and new photography. Although
digitization has in some cases made the documents
far more legible than they are in the original,
we are aware that in other cases they remain
hard to read. Scans, photocopies and microfilmed
images of 18th-century manuscripts under the
best of circumstances are not always clear, due
to deterioration of ink or paper, bleed-through,
and uneven surfaces. The quality of computer
monitors also varies dramatically. To assist
readers, we have provided some capacity to enlarge
and enhance the images. Better images
and information about the documents themselves
may be found by contacting the owning repositories,
using the contact information provided. Messages
indicating that images are not available at this
time may occur for a variety of reasons, including
the reluctance of an owning institution to allow
its property to be included. In the few
cases where we have not been able to decipher
a repository name and the source is listed as “Unknown,” questions
may be directed to the Columbia University Libraries
by using the “Comments” field.

Acknowledgments

We
are grateful to the many people whose hard work and
generosity have made this project possible. Among
these are James Baird (Project Editor, 2000-2002), Alison
Ward, Rose Bautista, Bernard Crystal, Ellen Wurtzel,
James Basker, Theodore Crackel, Janet Gertz, Beryl Abrams,
Robert Wolven, Patricia Renfro, Mary-Jo Kline, Pat Moran,
Kari Smith, and Matt Hampel; Columbia Libraries' Digital
Program and Systems Office staff members Angela Bukowy,
David Arjanik, Roberta Blitz, David Ortiz, Dmitri Laury,
Emily Holmes, Stephen P. Davis, Gary Bertchume and Breck
Witte; and the members of the Advisory Board. Alix
Schnee, Alan Weinreb and the very loyal staff of volunteers
at the John Jay Homestead in Katonah, New York have
also been of great assistance. Michael Hall, at
the National Endowment for the Humanities, gave helpful
advice. Financial help from the Florence Gould Foundation
and the Peck Stacpoole Foundation came at crucial moments
as we moved forward. Elaine Sloan, University Librarian
and Vice President for Information Services, encouraged
the project; her successor, James Neal, has continued
to support it with energy and enthusiasm.

Without the hard work of Richard B. Morris
and the many researchers and assistants who served as his staff
over the years, there would have been no material to digitize.
Particular credit must go to Ene Sirvet, Editor of the Jay papers
until 1996, whose efforts on behalf of the Jay papers were long-lasting
and heroic.

Comments & Quotes

"John Jay is no longer the forgotten founding
father. The Columbia Jay Papers project has
installed a nearly comprehensive collection of
the Jay Papers manuscript on line for all to peruse. Constant
improvements have made the site more and more convenient
to use. In a time when the founding fathers
are coming back into a spotlight, we can now get
better acquainted with this critical contributor
to the establishment of the Constitution and the
beginnings of the new republic."

Diane Shewchuk,
Director of the John Jay Homestead State Historic
Site in Katonah, N.Y (Feb. 2006):

The
Papers of John Jay is
a marvel of accessibility that makes it possible
for anyone to make detailed searches of documents
without having to travel to multiple repositories,
or spend hours reading page after fragile page
seeking that one elusive bit of information.
It allows one to follow up each
new discovery quickly with a fresh inquiry,
taking one on an investigatory odyssey that
would be far slower and more difficult without
it.”

Dr. Elizabeth M. Nuxoll, editor of
the new Jay letterpress edition:

All
of us will find our work simplified by the
improved search capacities and revised abstracts
now being made available, and enhanced by the addition
of so many documents to this publicly available
database. So too will the countless teachers,
students, writers, genealogists, and history
buffs unknown to us, who will log on to explore
these varied and fascinating documents and to use
them as building blocks for the scholarship of
the future.”